Mystery Man At Center Of Alleged Hollywood Sex Ring Has Vanished

Marc Collins-Rector is named in court documents as the man who hosted parties where Hollywood executives would allegedly sexually abuse teenage boys. He hasn’t been seen by U.S. authorities since 2007, and BuzzFeed is attempting to locate him. If you have any information about his whereabouts, email hunter.schwarz@buzzfeed.com.

1. Marc Collins-Rector, 54, is a registered sex offender accused of hosting parties where adult men who worked in the entertainment industry allegedly sexually abused teenage boys.

Collins-Rector has a history of being accused of sexually abusing underage boys. Multiple lawsuits were filed against him in the late ’90s and early ’00s in various jurisdictions, and he is mentioned several times in new lawsuits filed in a Hawaii federal court last week and Monday against X-Men director Bryan Singer and Hollywood executives Garth Ancier, Gary Goddard, and David Neuman. The four men denied allegations they sexually abused teenage boys at parties hosted by Collins-Rector at his home in Encino, Calif., and on trips to Hawaii.

The recent suits do not name Collins-Rector as a defendant, but they graphically detail instances in which he allegedly committed sexual abuse or assault. According to the court documents, he provided underage boys with alcoholic drinks, fondled them, engaged in oral copulation with them, and threatened them when they refused to have sexual contact with him, including one instance where he allegedly threatened a boy with a gun.

Collins-Rector moved out of the country, and in 2011 he renounced his American citizenship. The last known photograph of him is from 2007 in the United Kingdom, where The Sun published a photo of him with someone the newspaper claimed to be a young man. Collins-Rector’s current whereabouts are unknown.

2. Collins-Rector was the founder of Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a pre-YouTube streaming online video company that created its own content.

He also founded two other companies, World ComNet, which found travelers cheap flights and hotels before the internet in the ’80s, and Concentric Network, which made it cheaper and easier for internet users to log onto chatrooms and message boards in 1991, according to a 2000 ZDNet article.

The first show created for DEN was Chad’s World, about a teenage boy questioning his sexuality who moves into a Los Angeles-area mansion with three adult men including his older brother and his older brother’s boyfriend.

3. The suits filed this month against Singer and three other Hollywood executives allege employment at DEN was used to lure boys to parties held at Collins-Rector’s home where abuse allegedly occurred.

4. Michael Egan, the plaintiff in these suits, was hired by DEN when he was about 15 years old.

Egan was paid about $1,500 a week as an actor on a show titled Royal Standard, according to the suits.

He said he was introduced to Collins-Rector and DEN co-founder Chad Shackley — who, according to media reports, was in his early twenties at the time — through Shackley’s brother, Scott, with whom he went to school.

5. Chad Shackley was himself a teenager when he met Collins-Rector on an online message board, media reports say. DEN’s third co-founder was Brock Pierce, who acted in First Kid and the Mighty Ducks films. Pierce was still a teenager when he was named a DEN executive vice president.

Shackley dropped out of his Bay City, Mich., high school to move in with Collins-Rector sometime in the early ’90s. The two had “a sexual relationship,” according to Egan’s new lawsuits against the four Hollywood executives.

6. Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce lived at the “M & C Estate,” which stood for Marc and Chad, in Encino, Calif.

“It’s weird, like everyone knows there’s this weird thing going on between this 40-year-old guy and this 24-year-old guy, and this 16-year-old boy,” a former DEN executive told ZDNet in 2000. The former executive also thought there “was something wrong” with the show Chad’s World. “I could see a show about college men for a gay audience, but these were boys.”

7. The suits that Egan filed this month state the parties included drugs, alcohol, and sex, and there was a rule visitors couldn’t wear clothing or swimsuits in the pool area.

8. If the teenage boys refused to comply with the adult men’s requests for sex, they were allegedly threatened, Egan’s recent complaints say.

9. Back in 1999, a lawsuit was filed in a U.S. District Court in New Jersey accusing Collins-Rector of sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy from 1993 to 1996.

Collins-Rector settled the case, but its publicity damaged his reputation, and shortly afterward, he, Shackley, and Pierce resigned from DEN. DEN had planned to go public in 1999, but ended up filing for bankruptcy.

10. Several other lawsuits were filed against Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce in various jurisdictions in the early ’00s by men claiming they were sexually abused as teenagers.

One suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in July 2000 listed the plaintiffs as Egan, Alexander Burton, who played Pyro in the first X-Men film, and Mark Ryan. All three were DEN employees, according to court documents. An attorney for the plaintiffs, Jacob Arash Shahbaz, told BuzzFeed the case was over alleged sexual abuse. Collins-Rector did not respond to the suit, and the plaintiffs were awarded a multimillion-dollar default judgement, according to court records and the Associated Press.

Others who were plaintiffs in lawsuits accusing Collins-Rector of sexual abuse include:

• A 15-year-old boy named Ben L. who traveled from Minnesota to California to work in print and television ads was taken to Collins-Rector’s home by Jason Otto of Otto Model Management, court documents state. There, Collins-Rector allegedly “made sexual contact with” Lipkin “by means of intimidation,” according to the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in February 2001. The court awarded Lipkin a default judgement of just over $250,000, according to court records.

• A 15-year-old boy named Ryan G. was allegedly approached by Collins-Rector to wash his car. Collins-Rector later flew the boy from his home in Bay City, Mich., to Los Angeles at least 15 times from 1996 to 1997, court documents state. There, Collins-Rector allegedly provided him with alcoholic drinks, fondled him, engaged in oral sex with him, and purchased at least $12,000 in clothing and gifts, according to the complaint filed in May 2003 in Los Angeles Superior Court. The court awarded a default judgement against Collins-Rector for an unspecified amount, according to court records.

Those suits were civil; the police were not involved. In August 2000, however, a federal grand jury indicted Collins-Rector on criminal charges that he had transported minors across state lines for the purpose of having sex with them.

11. Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce moved to Marbella, Spain, where they were arrested by Interpol in May 2002.

Shackley and Pierce were released without charges after a month. Collins-Rector was sent to prison in Madrid, where he spent two years fighting attempts to extradite him to the U.S. (Collins-Rector does not currently appear in Interpol’s “wanted” database). In October 2003, he was extradited.

In June 2004, Collins-Rector pleaded guilty to transporting minors across state lines to have sex with them, according to court records and the AP. He paid a fine and served a few months, having received credit for time served in Spain.

He then appears to have moved to Boca Raton, Fla., according to public records. His parole was handed over to Florida law enforcement.

In 2006, a U.S. District Court granted Collins-Rector special permission to go to the United Kingdom to receive treatment for “a brain tumor,” according to a November 2007 article in Radar Magazine.

The Sunpublished a photo that claimed to be of Collins-Rector with a young boy in October 2007.

Later that year, Collins-Rector’s attorney filed a motion to terminate his client’s supervision requirement, according to Radar. In arguments against the motion, the assistant U.S. attorney argued Collins-Rector was trying to gain permanent residence in the U.K. by forming a civil union with his 18-year-old personal assistant, the magazine reported.

In August 2008, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement updated its records on Collins-Rector for the last time, listing him as living in an unspecified address in the Dominican Republic. A spokesman for the department told BuzzFeed that they don’t need to update the record unless Collins-Rector returns to Florida.

In the first quarter of 2011, Collins-Rector renounced his American citizenship.

Since then, the trail has gone cold. If you have information that could lead us to Collins-Rector, please email hunter.schwarz@buzzfeed.com.